Me, before clicking: Man, I remember I had this USR modem that did this weird BONG sound during handshake. I wonder if anyone else in the comments remembers that.

Comments: YUP.

This is only going to become more common. Companies are implementing checks using similar services (a) to prevent employment scams (where the person who interviews is not the person who works; usually the latter is a low-paid offshore individual) and (b) basic security authentication. It won’t be long before this sort of biometric validation starts showing up to authenticate users on regular websites and similar services, if it hasn’t already. I think the last one I had to do was to authenticate when activating a bank card.

Why would they need to do that? If you start working there you need to show up with your actual ID anyway.

Remote, multi location workforces, supervisors and workers thousands of miles apart.

One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate. He’s recently discovered that he can put an idea in Copilot and have it generate an email. So now instead of brief, correct, but difficult to parse emails we receive 20-paragraph, bulleted, formatted OpenAI slop. It’s been a very strange thing to see, like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.

"One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate."

I cannot imagine what it means. To me it reads like "I know someone who can run very fast but has no legs."

Capable doesn't mean capable of office work though, I could see someone with a language disorder doing electronics and have trouble with words, not numbers. Or someone who has trouble with written words specifically doing most of their learning with classes and videos.

Exactly right. The individual in question produces excellent deliverables within their space. They, the coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks almost none of your language but can understand it and produce good work.

Sam, and when you ask them a deeper question about it on a call they usually have no idea. It’s making people very lazy.

I have a similar coworker, but he's not great at prompting, so 10% of the time the AI version of himself makes confident assertions that he did not intend and are clearly not true. Genuinely no idea what I'm supposed to do about it.

Exactly right. He’s good at what he does, except communicating, and people are beginning to associate him with AI slop they don’t have time to read rather than the excellent work he does for them.

Yeah I hate it when people do that and I always call them out on it.

Unfortunately our company is trying to be "AI First" so they'll just point to that and continue their bullshit.

Our company literally promotes AI slop over personally made content even if it's mediocre crap. All they care about is rising usage numbers of things like copilot in office.

I read things like this, which I absolutely agree is happening, but then compare it to my ongoing, multi-day failures to create a child account on a Samsung device (which also involves a child account on Google, which is where the workflow is failing) and I wonder if the entire technology industry has simply given up. Every mobile experience is awful lately, nothing seems to work, errors pile up, and people just quit.

Well the obvious solution is take away the vote for over-65s!

/s … maybe

They do have less stake in the future and want short term policy payoffs...

Combine that with the initiatives of many a conservative or liberal political party to raise the retirement age beyond or up to 70 years.

Yeah, you have to work but you are not allowed to drive or vote any longer. Sounds fair.

It's not like voting does anything, anyway. Once elected, they do what they want.

I’ve come around to the belief that the biggest benefit of democracy is not choosing the best and wisest leaders.

The benefit is the regular ability to remove bad leaders. It doesn’t always happen as fast as we want but it happens eventually.

It’s not perfect, but imagine your least favorite president instead presiding for decades until death or coup.

The purpose of a system is what it does. There's lots of literature on what the best, or at least better, voting systems (hello preference voting) and decision making approaches are. Getting them implemented is another story.

Conversely, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

Scott aggressively missing the point of Beer’s maxim is not a counter-argument. Making a specific point would be more persuasive than a mere link.

I don't have a view on the main thrust of the comment, but "the purpose of a system is what it does" is very obviously wrong (as detailed in the linked blog post) and that is what I was responding to.

I believe we say "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to also poke at the fact that there are mechanisms and design decisions (tradeoffs) at play that lead to certain results, and that if we want to change outcomes, we need to change the system.

Votes matter more in some systems than others. Preference voting allows for smaller parties to more easily gain seats while first-past-the-post supports two-party systems. In the UK and AU, the prime minister must hold a seat, and so can be removed from parliament through (a subset of) citizen votes removing them from their seat, even if the majority party stays in power. In the US, the President (who can issue executive orders) is elected by an electoral college--none of whom are directly elected by citizen votes. Maybe it's not a big conspiracy, but these systems are doing what they are known to do, and will do so unless they are changed.

Of course there are systems in place to change these systems, which are also quite hard to utilise. And strangely (or not), no one is rushing to improve voter power and representation. So there's some interesting questions there around what changes can be made that would best improve representation, and what could be blocking those changes from being made.

My "favorite", and likely related, part of Apple News is that if I have blocked a source because it is unreliable, heavily biased, etc., and a story from that source appears in the main timeline, Apple News shows a greyed out version of the story--headline and image visible--with "You have blocked this publication" (or similar). You can still clearly see the story, so it's not blocked at all.

I assume this comes down to some sort of distribution agreement, but, as bad as the ads are, this single behavior is the reason I stopped using Apple News and continue searching for a successor.

Apple stocks app has a similar obnoxious pattern. It’s a genius UX. Why is this stock up/down today? Conveniently a bunch of articles are displayed that explain it. But there’s no way to block news sources that are paywalled. But there was a workaround in which you could individually block each news source. But then Apple gave themselves a way out. If “Apple editors” choose to highlight an article then you’ll be forced to see it regardless of your preferences. Coincidentally they do love to highlight paywalled articles.

I attempted to find a stocks app replacement but nothing else has such a slick interface and wasn’t also crammed full of ads.

I actually tried Ground News for a while because, you know, why not? I appreciate what they're trying to do, but the signal to noise ratio was so, so unfavorable between the UI clutter, the curious lack of certain categories, and the oddly slow update rate.

I also tried Ground News multiple times now, because I think it's a great idea but as you said, the UX is just so atrocious and completely unusable. I'm completely overwhelmed whenever I visit that the only choice I have is to close the tab and go read news somewhere else.

I mean that is also how it kinda works here on HN.

if you turned on the option in your settings to show blocked comments

Interesting post. I appreciate their candor and self-criticism, but, as a customer, I'm consistently surprised by how robust Tailscale ends up being, and how rarely I've experienced an issue that actually broke my tailnet. The sort of downtime that might keep me from accessing the admin tool or something else like that is rare enough, but my nodes have almost (?) never failed to talk to each other. Pretty great.

Caveat: I have a very small tailnet (<100 nodes). Anyone running with thousands of nodes may have a very different experience where inconvenience might be existential.

The reason for that is that all nodes talk p2p to each other. There is no central communication server like with many other vpn solutions. So even if Tailscale would go down for days you won't have any downtime between your nodes.

I accidentally gave my wife a prompt the other day. Everything was hellishly busy and I said something along the lines of “I need to ask you a question. Please answer the question. Please don’t answer any other issues just yet.” She looked at me and asked “Did you just PROMPT me?” We laughed. (The question was the sort that might spawn talking about something else and was completely harmless. In the abstract, my intent was fine but my method was hilariously tainted.)

I've gotten more value out of it than just about any ongoing subscription I have. It's clean, fast, deeply customizable (i.e., excluding "answers" websites or any other domain you never want to see again), and, for what it is, inexpensive. Honestly if Google (or Bing) worked like Kagi does, I'd trade some of the privacy for the utility.

It's of course very difficult to justify, but in your example, Zelenskyy has the approval of the Ukrainians for now, while Maduro only had the approval of the military and a low percent of civilians.

The approval of the people is irrelevant if Putin cites Zelenskyy’s democratic illegitimacy as a reason to remove him (which, arguably, they have) or Trump as a reason to withhold support.